Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 67.0.73.201 (talk) at 04:31, 15 May 2006 (→Added No Sources Box). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Archive of older discussions:

• January - March 26
• Archive of lengthy, insulting rants from "TruthInAdvertising" long-term vandal

Note: After three months of dealing with the TruthInAdvertising long-term vandal (See vslashg's note below) with no sign of their making a serious attempt at adhering to the cornerstone Misplaced Pages policy of civility, I've decided to move most of this anonymous vandal's lengthy rants about product features and how Misplaced Pages is "shilling" into a separate talk page. I will continue to do this in the future as well, so the rest of us who are interested in writing an encyclopedic article can get on with it in relative peace. Warrens 06:04, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Sockpuppet evidence

I have compiled evidence that User:TruthInAdvertising, User:BoycottRealBasic2005, User:FalseInformation, and 67.0.* are all the same user. See User:Vslashg/TruthInAdvertising Sockpuppets for the full list. Vslashg (talk) 22:19, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Screenshots

I've removed many of the screenshots in this article. After my removals, there are five, which I think is plenty for this product. Even five may be excessive. Compare to Visual Basic, a much more prominent product which has two screenshots. Vslashg (talk) 19:06, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Verification

Where are the outside links to verify text of this article and sample code? where are the outside photos from independent articles (i.e. not from Real software or publications whcih get advertising dollars from RS)? Based upon your past shilling I don't believe ay of the information you are are posting and want outside articles which say it is true. I don;t know you from "Adam" and have no reason to believe anything you have to say. Its time you live up to the standards and rules you wish to impose on other people - your univerfied information is going to be removed in the same manner. —This unsigned comment was added by 67.0.73.223 (talk • contribs) .

You've tried this stunt multiple times before. We were not amused. (And you're not really making your WP:POINT very well.) Please don't do it again. Zetawoof 10:11, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

They did it again. Warrens 06:11, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

More About Revert Wars

This is the same clown who's been banned from the REAL Software mailing list, the REALbasic user forums (on numerous occasions) and realgurus (a 3rd party user forum, also on multiple occasions). They've also been active on the REALbasic newsgroups with the same tripe. I'm not terribly shocked that you're running into issues with them on the Wiki. Unfortunately, there's no end in site as this person has absolutely no rational interest in conflict resolution -- they just want to stir up trouble.

I just want to say that I appreciate everyone's tireless efforts to stem the tide of vandalism on the Wiki from this one abusive person. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 204.251.84.212 (talk • contribs) .

AfD

The AfD template was still on the page (possibly due to a revert; I admit I haven't been following this dispute), even though the discussion was closed last month with a result of speedy keep. For the sake of reference, here's the link to the discussion. Misplaced Pages:Articles_for_deletion/REALbasic -- stubblyhead | /_c 06:30, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

User:Vslashg/TruthInAdvertising_Sockpuppets is a succinct summation of what's been going on with this article for the last several weeks Warrens 06:32, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Moved from article

I removed the following from the article, it talks about the article itself and I don't know if it would belong in it even if it didn't. –Tifego _{06:57, 8 April 2006 (UTC)}

The following features are a small sampling of features removed from this product since the introduction of RB2005 and will help consumers determine the long term stability of other features mentioned within this article, which is being wrongly used to portray that everyhthing is o.k. with this product. In order for this article to be truely fair it must portray both the pros and the cons of this product, not just Real Software propaganda.

1. The original Macintosh interface was removed, a interface which Mac users had been using for years.
2. The ability to open individual project items into seperate untabbed Macintosh windows was removed.
3. The ability to have the prperties pallet and the control pallet in seperate movable windows was removed as they are now permanately affixed within a project's main window.
4. The ability to export a project as a plain text file.
5. Color pallet window removed.
6. Code spliter removed.
7. A Classic Mac icon and mask (size 16 x 12) were removed from the icon build window.
8. The ability to read the built-in Language Reference as a book was removed. Instead of the former easy to read book format in which individual subjects were explained on one scrollable page the new format utilizes hundreds of pages to examine individual subject terms, forcing the user to constantly switch back and forth among many pages.

You are nothing but product shillers for this product as you do not even follow your own rules - you remove information posted by others, yet your won information does not follow the same rules or guidelines - then when trys to make you follow your own rules you call it vandalism. This article needs to removed from Wiki is is not neutral and is only advertisement for Real software and is not a discussion of REALbasic the programming language. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.0.72.233 (talk • contribs)

Then why don't you make it a neutral article, instead of yelling at us about it? We don't have a problem with negative things being added to the article, but we do have a problem with unsourced and unencyclopedically-worded statements going into the article. What things make this article like an advertisement, specifically, besides everything? –Tifego _{07:38, 8 April 2006 (UTC)}

I'd like to point out this revision, which shows a good example of what User:TruthInAdvertising was trying to add to the article. The three sections are "Application Size", "Prior IDE Version History", and "Historical Long Term & Existing Bug History". It's worth reading to see what we're dealing with.

I tried my best to address these in this talk page, but I failed. Application Size seems to me to be total WP:OR, unverifiable unless you obtain and install several versions of RealBASIC on your machine (I contend this is precisely the sort of burden WP:NOR is trying to prevent. If the application growth were notable, wouldn't it have been addressed in a verifiable source?)

The Bug History section seemed out of place as well. My take was that all applications have bugs, but I wasn't sure that these bugs were notable enough to belong in Misplaced Pages. As someone else put it, this is an encyclopedia, not a bug-tracking database.

Prior IDE Version History is probably the salvagable section in all of this. It appears that REALBasic has made a shift from being primarily Mac-based to primarily Windows-based, and this has affected the latest version's Mac IDE. This fact feels encyclopedic to me, and can probably be addressed more concisely and with an encyclopedic tone.

I think it's also fair to say that this article may be too large and leans towards an advertisment tone. I think the code snippets probably do not belong -- this is just another implementation of BASIC, and there's nothing surprising in the sample code that seems REALbasic-specific. And at one point there must have been a dozen screenshots. I've scaled them back and it still feels like perhaps too many. (Compare to Visual Basic which has two.)

But that said, these issues have mostly not been addressed, because the vast majority of useful edits here have been reverting one person's vandalism. User:TruthInAdvertising's response to my original WP:OR and WP:V concerns was to add screenshots, descriptive text, and unhelpful forum links to the article. This diff does a fairly good job showing what was added. One such addition:

To duplicate the above file sizes download a copies of REALbasic from REAL Software's web site (older editions can be downloaded from REAL Software's ftp web site). In each edition open a new default desktop project with a single window; do not add any code or controls to the project, and compile applications for the various operating systems.

Which I think misses the point of WP:NOR completely.

I'm not sure if we can resolve this issue through the talk page. Scrolling up will show my previous attempts at starting a discussion to resolve this. I still would be very pleased if we could come to an agreement with User:TruthInAdvertising on how to make this article feel less like an ad. I'm positive, though, that the solution is not sticking large, unencyclopedic rants into the article, nor is it removing all non-wikilink text. It's yet to be shown that User:TruthInAdvertising is interested in any other course of action. Vslashg (talk) 08:32, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

It can see how it seems hypocritical, that there are absolutely zero references in this article and yet additions are being reverted using WP:NOR as justification. But I think that's not the main reason for rejecting these additions.

1. "Application Size" is simply not important. Someone who wants to learn what REALbasic is probably doesn't care about the executable sizes that different versions of it happen to generate. It's not all that much more OR than the rest of the article seems to be, but there is no agreement that it matters.
2. "Prior IDE Version History" actually looks OK to me besides lots of spelling errors and some irrelevant asides.
3. "Historical Long Term & Existing Bug History" isn't encyclopedic material. If somebody has said or published about these bugs, then it should probably go in the article, but listing bugs as if they are obvious facts is not good.

Also, the justification for leaving in the article's current content is that we feel it could potentially be cited, as opposed to something like "application sizes" where there is reason to believe that no reliable source has ever given that information. Several statements in the current article could do with some citation, but at least there is no reason to believe that such citation doesn't exist. That, and that some of the current content really shouldn't be kept, like some of the sample code and screenshots. But, I was hoping there were some specific statements in the article that are being claimed as too much like advertisement. –Tifego _{09:39, 8 April 2006 (UTC)}

"Brutal Edit" - What I've done

Let's see.

• I've removed most of the screenshots. I personally feel that the two screenshots - the one in the infobox, and the one at "Current Versions of IDE" - should suffice. It isn't necessary to post screenshots of every single feature of the program, so I've removed images of things like the documentation viewer (which just looks like an embedded HTML browser or something) and an empty code editor. If there's some important feature which isn't pictured, fix it!
• I've removed a lot of the sample code. As it stood, the example code was presented largely without explanation. The Complex class example, however, did explain the code somewhat, and - more importantly - demonstrated a feature unusual to this specific dialect (classes and operator overloading). I don't know RealBasic myself, so there may be other unusual features which bear explanation; if so, again, fix it!
• Finally, I've heavily trimmed the external links:
  • First of all, separate links to Real Software's main site, their forums, and their mailing list interface are unnecessary - so I removed everything but a link to the main site.
  • Then, there's the ten or fifteen links to tutorial sites. That's certainly excessive. I've removed most of them, picking the three that remain more or less arbitrarily. I did, however, avoid sites that were down, or which charge for their information, as those are less likely to be useful to the reader.

Thoughts? Questions? Complaints? Zetawoof 00:56, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

It looks a lot better, you, uhh, shill and stuff! Nice work. Warrens 01:24, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. Very well done. Vslashg (talk) 01:47, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

My only complaint is that some of what's leftover is still not very neutral-sounding, but I'm trying to fix that a bit. –Tifego _{03:25, 9 April 2006 (UTC)}

Language features section

I'm not sure what to do about the "Language features" section. I'm sure REALbasic can probably be used to do those things, but I highly doubt they can be called core features of the language itself; programming languages don't concern themselves directly with such high-level functionality as those. I changed it to say it "has libraries supporting" those features, but library support doesn't belong in the "language features" section even if they are provided with the language. I think maybe a few of the things in that list are language features, though. I'm having trouble finding a definition of the REALbasic language anywhere, even on REALbasic's website. –Tifego _{03:48, 9 April 2006 (UTC)}

Yes, it's correct to say that those features are the features that REAlbasic framwork has. Still I think they should be listed, otherwise for every articles about an object-oriented programming language, you would write 2 lines of text. --Kiam 15:17, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Not certain I understand

I added a paragraph which describes a new feature of REALbasic (dynamic constants & Lingua), which was promptly removed by Vslashg due to "spam concerns." What are these concerns, exactly? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.251.84.212 (talk • contribs)

Your paragraph was removed because it wasn't encyclopedic in tone. Misplaced Pages isn't a user's manual, a forum for product advertising, or a personal blog — it's an encyclopedia. When writing articles here, you don't talk to the audience (ie. use of the second-person "you"). The goal is to describe, in factual and verifiable language, the notable and important information about the subject. This is per the Misplaced Pages Manual of Style, which we are all bound by when contributing. Warrens 22:49, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the information, I'll keep it in mind for future edits. But wouldn't it have been friendlier for you to correct the mistake instead of simply removing it (since it sounds like it was more the tone of the addition than the content, to a certain degree)? I realize removing it is easier, but correcting it would be better, no? Regardless of tone, the information is certainly still useful to people reading the excerpt; removing it destroys any usefulness that might have been there (it also tends to irk a Wiki-n00b like myself who's simply trying to help add information and don't have the time or the inclination to read through 22 sections of information before trying to help out). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.251.84.212 (talk • contribs)

I didn't remove the text. Someone else did. Warrens 03:37, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Hah! Thanks for pointing the obvious out.  ;-) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.251.84.212 (talk • contribs)

About citations

So I notice there's a lot of talk about citation issues, which leads me to the question: how do you cite something which is factual in nature, and fully-verifiable by items NOT online/common knowledge?

For instance, someone marked "Its built-in framework supports " in the article. You can verify the information by either downloading the product and trying it out or downloading the language reference and reading it. How would you properly cite this (to appease whoever feels it needs citation)? I've read thru the citation guidelines, and they're not terribly helpful on the topic.

Can someone provide decent examples of how to properly cite parts of this article?

• Then why don't you cite the language reference? It is available in print, PDF and online so you could link to it and also mention the page number the framework is mentioned on. — Wackymacs 16:31, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Ok, but what would be the proper format for the citation?

"According to the language reference, its built-in framework supports hash tables (page number), threads (page number), real-time 3D graphics (page number)..."

Would that format suffice? Or would it detract from the overall meaning of the paragraph (since there would be a lot of space devoted towards page numbers)?

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.251.84.212 (talk • contribs)

I ended up doing it like that, but excluded Harvard referencing for brevity. The citations page was unclear as to the proper way to denote a list of facts all coming from different pages of the same source. And I figured it'd be better to over-document the location of the information instead of under-document it. If someone dislikes the way I've cited the framework stuff, then feel free to modify it as appropriate (perhaps an all-encompassing Harvard reference at the end of the list would suffice). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.251.84.212 (talk • contribs)

Language Features

The language features section in the article is littered with (pg x) references. Which book is being referred to? If such a reference needs to be made it sould be just kept in the footnote references section. The section need not be crowded with such vague inline references. It makes it harder to read. --soUmyaSch 16:58, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Look up a few lines to the About Citations topic. That explains the page reference "littering." If it's improper citation (which is entirely possible), perhaps it'd be better to just put a true Harvard citation at the end of the list instead. In any event, the page numbers refer to the language reference (mentioned before the list starts) and is cited in the references section. I should also note that the reason I put in references at all was because someone put a citation needed tag in that section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.251.84.212 (talk • contribs)

A more complete history section?

Is there anyboody whom is able to make a more complete history section? I think it could list the features introduced with every release of REALbasic. --Kiam 15:27, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

That would get long fairly quickly, so I'd recommend against it. Though a "latest" features section isn't a bad idea. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.22.6.43 (talk • contribs)

What happened?

What happened to the images in the main article? They were there yesterday, but not today..209.198.132.66 17:07, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

There are some technical problems with Misplaced Pages today. The images will come back soon, hopefully. Warrens 17:29, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Cool -- I just wanted to make sure it wasn't some new form of vandalism. Thanks! 209.198.132.66 17:40, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Semiprotection

I have semiprotected the page due to constant disruption. Just letting you know. Sasquatch t|c 02:45, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Huh. I tried for a sprot a few days ago, but the request was denied. Ah well. Zetawoof 04:34, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Heh, well, there never has been a semi-protection standard but looking through the logs I can justify it. Sasquatch t|c 01:43, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

As much as it pains me that this was needed (it means I can't modify the page for a while), I'm still glad to see it happen. 204.251.84.212 14:29, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

You should make an account! It only takes a minute, you get some extra tools like being able to upload images and configure the appearance of Misplaced Pages, and future page-protections won't stop you from editing. Warrens 15:32, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Ok, Ok, you've convinced me.  :-P BudVVeezer 16:25, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Justification

The schill was pointing out that the ExtremeBasic link removal was improper because it's not based on Java. Since I was the one who removed the link, I feel the need to justify its removal. From the mouth. He's basing the entire runtime on Java, while keeping the language constructs. Since REALbasic is a commercial product whose apps use native OS controls, I don't think a pre-alpha, in-some-guy's-spare-time project which doesn't use native controls is terribly relevant to anyone reading this article. 204.251.84.212 14:29, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Added No Sources Box

This article still does not provide links to independent sources for tis material as such a warning needs placed on top for all potential purchasers of this product, unless of course if the sole purpose of this artilce is really to sell more licenses for this product.

You again, "Boycotrealbasic"? All you ever do around here is a push a clear anti-Realbasic POV. Warrens 04:11, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

"Boycotrealbasic"? - Who is that? Realbasic? thats Funny - I own multiple licenses and currently use 5.5.5 pro. Unlike you, who either don't have have clue about RB or or simply a shill for Real Software.

Perhaps you don't get Wiki - it requires verfied sources - and strangely there are none in this article.

Removed the register.com article

1. What qualifies Tony Smith an a RB expert? Never heard of him and have never read a RB book by him.

2. I object to this article being placed here as the main point of article strongly appears to be to link to a page which included Google ads for Realbasic, which is clicked benefit the author and company hosting the article as opposed to being objective.

3. This person clearly is NOT an RB expert because his review contains completely false information:

"For folk with an eye toward multi-core processors, RealBasic is capable of generating multi-threaded code."

In the above statement he clearly says RB is capable of running multiple thread on multi processor computers - that is, the seperate processors work on different threads at the same time in order to complete them faster than running the threads in linear fashion.

Under no circumstances does RB run multiple threads at the same time; it runs a small part of one thread and then a small part of another thread to give the appearance of running multiple threads at the same time. This is clearly stated on page 192 of Matt Neuberg's book Realbasic: A Definite Guide (2nd Edition).

4. This article contain biased information which is directed against the original Macintosh users who do not agree with the Windows centric views this author has expressed.